We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eron Rauch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eron below.
Eron, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
Curiosity. Nothing does more to reorient my perspective when all I see is my world is falling apart. Curiosity is what gets me through when a project has stalled or crashed; it reconnects me when I am feeling isolated from others and getting lost in my own head. Curiosity is what opens up a crack of wonder and terror and awe and new perspectives. Learning to encourage the curious part of me fuels not just myself, but my artwork, my advocacy, my friendships, and so many of the most interesting, surprising, and rewarding parts of life.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Other than pouring myself into my job as a writer at Riot Games, my focus for 2023 has been building an archive of my photo documentaries, artworks, and writing around early American anime fandom and cosplay for preservation in the Williams College Museum of Art and their library’s special collections. Bridges of Desire and a huge number of previously unseen outtakes from it are the heart of the work being acquired, but also the Neo-Japonisme Project, Eternal World (which is about Gothic Lolita and Japanese street fashion,) Bad Fan Museum, and others. We’re doing this so researchers and students will be able to immerse themselves into that nigh-hallucinogenic period at the front of the 2000s when the scene was quickly exploding from a small subculture to a media juggernaut. It’s been wild to bring together close to 500 pieces of art and a few other artifacts, spanning my earliest photos to talks I gave in Tokyo 15 years later. I mean, if you want to know how different it was then, one of the old zines I included had an article about if cosplay is bad for cons!
But I’ll tell you what, spending all of your free time delving intimately back into your early 20s is an absolute trip, and not always pleasant. There was a portion in the middle where I felt like it was going to swallow me. My early 20s were… tough… and the memories and raw feelings the work dredged up were often really painful or intense. There was also this creeping dread that I’ll never again make any art anyone will care about this much. During the middle of prepping all the work, I’d have anxiety dreams and nightmares sometimes, and my mental health really took a dive. I felt like I was living in that shadow world Frodo sees when he puts on the One Ring, but it was all VHS fansub static and workers in the dealer’s hall yelling at me to buy things. Curiously, as I hit the last stretch before I turned it in, I found an old CDr mix (I told you it was a while ago) of anime soundtrack tunes my friends and I loved. I started jamming that and some of My Analog Journal’s Japanese 80s and 90s mixes while I worked, and turned a corner, growing more and more excited that I’d be able to preserve, for 100 or more years, this time, place, and culture that mattered so much to all of us; to give anyone who wants to look a glimpse into the period that formed so much of the foundation for all youth and online culture since. I realized how lucky I was to be at the right place, right time, with the right critical curiosity, and the right artistic medium. I’m not sure I really want to look at all this work again, but I also feel so light knowing it has become its own force, existing out in the world, an ancient weeb star in the sky that maybe someone will use to navigate by.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1) Learn how to learn long-term: This seems strange, but the ability to get to a place of self-generating learning in a topic or field of practice is a fundamental life skill. Whatever your interest, passion, or profession, there’s a tipping point where you cross from knowing to understanding, and that’s where you start to have agency, start to be able to make new connections, and start to be able to snowball. “Learn the fundamentals” is misleading, in that it implies there’s a linear track. Start wherever you like, but learn deep. Want to learn to make a surfboard but are curious about asymmetrical boards? Go for it. I half-joke that this method isn’t “mastering fundamentals,” but learning by making every basic mistake possible, so you know the secret, messy-but-generative fundamentals of the self-proclaimed fundamentals. Give yourself permission to play. Never think you’ve learned everything.
2) Be part of something: I’ve been bad at this, but when I look at everything I’ve done that matters long-term, it had a core group of people all contributing, experimenting, thinking, partying, searching, being excited, and working together. It’s easy to see this with something formal like Orenda Records/Creative Underground Los Angeles or the experimental video game blog scene. (I think a lot about how much impact Fort Thunder had on music and art; and also how much my crappy anime zine in high school still feels like where everything in my art and career spawned from.) But even for something as seemingly simple as surfing, a major part of how far into it I’ve gotten is because I have friends to pile in a car, talk weather, try odd watercraft, brave some heavy waves, find cool spots, take photos, share obscure history, and explore what this odd water dance artform might mean in the context of our other art practices.
3) Writing your own narrative: When you make work from the fringes, make work that breaks the bounds of multiple disciplines or traditions, or make work that comes from an identity outside the institutions, learning to research and write your own history is key. Practice explaining your weird interests and perspective with your peers and then share it; learn to dig up reference points and practitioners that don’t make it into the mainline canon; learn to document and share other people’s work in your scene; figure out how to create artifacts that explain how what your and your scene is doing, fits together, and why it matters. This also makes your work way more legible in the future, since you’re articulating and preserving its context. This was a huge part of the success of some of us in the early video game screenshot scene. Kent Sheely, I, and others were making work, but also writing, theorizing, chronically, and collaborating as it was happening. We collaborated to build the critical foundation, the history, and the techniques, all while we were also making the work.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
It’s a little bit of a cheat, but it’s hard to overstate the influence on me of the show catalog of Takashi Murakami’s Superflat exhibit. I was fortunate enough to see the show at the Walker Art Center, but I spent hours and hours pouring over that book, which had a slew of other works and critical context. It was combo’ed in impact by his companion book Little Boy, an absolute codex of underground nerd currents that revealed and charted the interplay of major influences on the artists in Superflat. Don’t get me wrong, the somewhat pop-surrealist-status-commodity aspect of some of the [now] bigger names in the show has worn thin. But the reason it was such a lasting influence even now, is that it gave me a powerful example of how you can take the very stuff of life, the pixelated, online, media underground, the incredibly vital nascent culture you are in, and craft work from that subject position about what’s happening, create a critical dialog about it, and remap new versions of art history to explore what was going on and why you were so interested in intervening in it. The books really empowered me to say, “Yes, this is important and worth making art about, and here’s why, and here’s where it comes from in a shadowed past you never saw going to a future you can’t imagine” to the many people who told me to stop making work about anime conventions, cosplay, MMORPGs, and the rising storm of fandom and online spaces. That work has only grown in relevance to understanding our current world where fandom and virtuality are omnipresent, and maybe even more heartwarming to me, is being used as building blocks by new generations of people engaged in similar projects, crafting new, radical histories and art forms.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.eronrauch.com
- Instagram: @eron_rauch
- Other: www.videogamesforthearts.com
Image Credits
For the photo of me: Timothy Maloof For all the other images, they are pieces of my art.
